The NCAA released their annual report on baseball attendance recently, and
I wanted to take this week's column to look at the results. I'm always
conflicted when looking at these things. On the one hand, I've always
preached that popularity is a dangerous goal for a sport, since things done
in the name of popularity can damage the actual quality of the sport, so
I don't want to give the impression that there's anything inherently
praise-worthy about getting more people involved. On the other hand, when
you're looking at something like actual attendance figures rather than
something tenuous like TV ratings, it's a useful measure of reflected team
success. It's also quite true that bigger crowds can make the ballpark
experience more enjoyable, since there's an energy there that feeds on
itself in wonderful ways sometimes.

Unfortunately, there's been a trend over the last few years that tends to
undercut the value of attendance figures. Most of the larger schools,
probably in a measure to make the numbers more reflective of their
financial impact, but also because it's easier, have taken to reporting
tickets sold, including season tickets, rather than actual bodies in
attendance. This leads to silly results like LSU essentially averaging a
complete sellout for all home games, when they had several midweek
early-season games with fewer than 2000 folks actually there, or Alabama
finishing second in the nation in attendance in an off-season with fairly
sparse crowds most of the time. I haven't researched this in too much
depth, although looking at attendance figures for mid-week games tells
me that most of the big teams are doing this; the only large program I
know of that still actually counts heads is Mississippi State, which
makes their seventh-place finish in average attendance more impressive,
since it includes a couple of under-1000 games.

None the less, the numbers are worth looking at, since they give a good
feel for what's possible for a successful program in several areas of the
country. So, here's the leader board; the full report is available on
the NCAA Web site.

Total

Average

Rank

Team

Games

Total

Average

Rank

Team

Games

Total

Average

1

Louisiana State

37

276,622

7,476

1

Louisiana State

37

276,622

7,476

2

Alabama

32

180,310

5,635

2

Alabama

32

180,310

5,635

3

Texas

35

150,901

4,311

3

Texas A&M

33

147,400

4,467

4

Texas A&M

33

147,400

4,467

4

Texas

35

150,901

4,311

5

South Carolina

37

145,616

3,936

5

South Carolina

37

145,616

3,936

6

Tulane

48

127,670

2,660

6

Wichita State

27

96,158

3,561

7

Miami, Florida

46

123,680

2,689

7

Mississippi State

33

93,174

2,823

8

Fresno State

39

105,162

2,696

8

Auburn

30

84,568

2,819

9

Rice

38

99,574

2,620

9

Baylor

33

92,672

2,808

10

Wichita State

27

96,158

3,561

10

Arizona State

34

93,732

2,757

Mea Culpa

Now, for something completely different, an apology. One of the principles
that I've always tried to hold to in doing this site is that there's enough
secrecy and confusion already present in the statistical part of the game,
and that anything I do would be open and accessible for review. When I'm
writing about human issues, I'll respect a source's desire for privacy, but
the original statistical work is as open as I can make it -- the ISR
algorithm is described in the FAQ, I have a standing offer to give the
source code for any of this stuff to anyone who wants it, and I've always
discussed the limitations and increasing accuracy of the pseudo-RPI's openly.

All of this work, of course, has computer programs at its core; it's
impossible to do the kind of computation I do weekly during the season by
hand, nor would any sane person want to. I do the best I can with that,
but it's a truism that every piece of software will eventually be found to
have bugs, and I found mine last week. In reviewing the conference portion
of the actual RPI's, I noticed that I had done something dumb in the
program that averages team RPI's to produce the conference RPI's. Basically,
teams that had left Division I were still being counted with an RPI of 0,
so the results for the conferences they had been in were lower than they
should have been.

The most glaring example of this came from Portland State having left the
Pac 10, which made the Pac 10 come in much lower in the pseudo-RPI's than
in the actuals.

I do apologize for this error. I'll correct it before next season,
obviously, and I hope to put together a past conference ranking section,
which will have been corrected. Thank you for your indulgence, and I'll
work to be even more diligent in my results.